The following morning, Charles Binney kissed his ma, shook his father’s hand, hugged his younger brother, and left for the war.

The next time they saw him, he was a stars and stripes triangled into a military tuck.

Kwy Lao had been amused by Too High’s scaling of the tree, for a neem tree isn’t the easiest thing in the world to climb. Spurred on by her apparent enthusiasm for this feat of daring, he attempted to climb higher and faster, even made a noise like a monkey. It was the attempted scratching of his own armpit that was his undoing. One hand seemed insufficient to bear the sudden weight of his lengthy frame, and he fell suddenly, silently, and altogether surprised. He broke his neck on impact, and the expression on his face was as calm and untroubled as a summer sky.

Five Company had possessed neither the will nor the stamina to cut an LZ for a dust off, nor to call in a Huey or a Chinook to carry Too High home. They decided to commit him to the ground then and there, and while a young man from Boise, Idaho, called Luke “Dodge” Chrysler said a few words from the Bible, Too High’s body was sunk in a swamp. “Oh God, thou art my God,” he murmured. “Earnestly I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is …” They were the only words Luke Chrysler knew—Psalms 63, the Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah. How he knew them, and why, he could not remember, but he did. And though this in itself did not seem fitting, seeing as how they were sinking him in a swamp, it seemed better to have some words quoted than none at all.

Five Company RTO radioed a message, the message became a dispatch, the dispatch became a telegram, and then a flag. The flag was folded perfectly into something no bigger than a 9th Street Diner king-sized chili burrito, and it was delivered to the Binney household by a narrow-shouldered, pinch-faced man called Mr. Weathers.

And so Charles “Too High” Binney—who fell from a neem tree while showing off for a girl called something like Kwy Lao, a breathtakingly pretty girl, slender as a fern, her ai do draped over her form like a ghost—died not in battle, not with the taste of blood on his teeth; died not for valor nor country nor simply the spirit of war, but with an erection and the promise of a good lay. Such was the idiocy and reality and simplicity of war. Of course, his parents were never told such a thing, for such a thing would not have been respectful of the dead. They were told he’d been hit by a sniper while seeking refuge for his company on a bright Tuesday morning near Nha Trang at the foot of the Chu Yang Sin Mountains. His father, perhaps wishing to gain some sense of understanding, had searched out an atlas and looked for this place. He found it, right there on the tip of a country he had never even considered before, the width of his fingernail from something called The Mouths of the Mekong, and though he now knew where his son’s body lay, it did not ease nor explain the vast gulf of sadness into which he and his wife had been swallowed. And swallowed they were, like Jonah into the whale.

Gaines remembered Binney’s face, as he did all those who died around him, in front of him, behind him. They all bore the same expression. The same as Nancy Denton. An expression like an empty house. In death, bodies do things that they could never do in life. They bend, they break, they hang upside down. A booby trap in a tunnel mouth turned a solider into nothing but blood and jutting bones, as if the force of war alone could fold a human being inside out.

Gaines thought of Binney in that moment, the way his body disappeared into the swamp. He wondered then if Binney would still be the same, preserved like Nancy Denton.

In his five years of police service, Gaines had not seen such a thing as Nancy Denton. He had seen enough, of course, but nothing so macabre, nothing so unsettling.

Gaines’s twelve-month tour of duty had ended in October of 1968. Back then, as had remained the case right through, if a soldier agreed to serve another six months, he could take a thirty-day R & R at the army’s expense anywhere in the world. They would fly him out there, bring him back, pay him while he soaked up whatever world he’d been transported to, and then they would come and get him. Gaines did that. He didn’t know why. He completed his twelve months, he survived, and yet he could not face the prospect of going home. Going home seemed more fearful than staying in-country. He took the thirty days. He asked them to fly him to Australia, and they did. He was in Melbourne for a week, did nothing but chain-smoke, drink bourbon, listen to Hendrix and Joplin. He sat in bars crowded with Seabees who had served on coastal patrol boats in the Yellow Sea and Cat Lo; with brown water sailors; with Marine Corps and SEALs; with men from the Mobile Construction Battalion; with laconic and intimidating Special Forces flattops, their jackets bearing eight or ten gold hash marks, one for each six-month tour they had served. A week, that was all, and then Gaines applied for reintegration to his platoon. He knew that if he stayed for thirty days, most of the people he knew, most of his friends, would be dead by the time he got back. The application was received; Gaines was told to see an army psychologist. The psychologist asked questions that Gaines could not answer, and then he signed the release and Gaines was packed onto a flight and expedited to a combat zone near Ð

k Tô.

On the 12th of December, 1968, John Gaines was shot through the stomach in Buon Enoa, east of Ban Me Thuot. His platoon had been assigned to assist the Special Forces deployment run by 5th Group at Nha Trang. Special Forces were working “hearts and minds” on the Montagnard people, a minority peoples persecuted by the South Vietnamese. Their history of conflict with the South Vietnamese made them easy targets for Viet Cong subversion, but in exchange for their loyalty to the South, they were given military assistance and civic support. The program worked, and the Montagnard militia became enormously effective in search and destroys against VC bases and outposts.

It was during one such mission that Gaines’s platoon came under heavy fire. Thirty-eight men went out, twenty-one came back, and of those twenty-one, eight were wounded. The bullet that hit Gaines had missed all vital organs. It was a through and through, but he bled heavily, and when he arrived in the field hospital outside of Ðà Lat, he was in poor shape. Gaines had survived Ð

k Tô in November of the previous year, the heaviest conflict since the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. Back then, the fighting had been so intense that medevacs—the KIA Travel Bureau—could not land to collect the dead and wounded. Perhaps Gaines had believed himself impregnable, unassailable, blessed with divine protection. His mother, Alice, had written to him about faith. She was a Louisiana Catholic. She believed in God, in Jesus Christ who died for our sins, but she believed also in Papa Legba, in conjure, in grimoires, in Li Grand Zombi and gris-gris. She was a complex woman, a woman of strange superstitions and intense shifts of mood, and in her letters—the few that Gaines received—she spoke of perceiving him, guiding him, defending him against the shadow of death. It was not until Gaines returned to Whytesburg that he understood how ill she had become, that in his absence she had been diagnosed with cancer, that she was drifting between spells of extraordinary lucidity and morphine-induced hallucination. Gaines’s neighbors, Leonard and Margaret Rousseau, their daughter, Caroline—all of thirteen years old at the time—were good people, and they kept watch over her, did their utmost to assist her, but she was a difficult and ornery woman at the best of times.